Large automotive vehicles, including station wagons, vans, passenger trucks, utility and recreational vehicles, are often purchased for their carrying capacity. This carrying capacity includes not only the transportation of passengers, but also the transportation of various sizes and amounts of cargo. For this reason, most, if not all, of these vehicles come with some type of removable or stow-away seat.
Typically, the removable seat assemblies of these vehicles are of the self-standing type. Accordingly, each seat assembly has its own set of frame-mounted legs or risers. Once the seat assembly is positioned inside the vehicle, the frame-mounted risers are bolted or attached to the floor of the vehicle.
The frame-mounted risers do not interfere with either the driver or the passenger once secured in the vehicle, but they do present significant size and weight limitations.
Typically, frame-mounted risers have a height variance of 8 to 14 inches. The increased height is advantageous in that it promotes passenger comfort and visibility. However, this increase in assembly height may present problems, predominantly during the installation and removal of the seat assembly in the limited confines of the vehicles cargo area. The protruding riser hooks or attachment points may scratch floors, doors, doorwells, and sometimes even the legs of the person handling the assembly.
A second limitation of frame-mounted risers is the resulting weight increase to the seat assembly itself, which adds difficulty in handling the removed seat assembly. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the person removing the seat must usually do so while in a bent over position due to the limited confines of the vehicle's cargo area.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,946,216 attempted to solve the problems associated with a frame-mounted riser by mounting each seat riser at separate locations for each side of a seat within the floor of a vehicle. However, a significant problem with such an arrangement is that the stack-up of tolerances between the risers, their support structure, and the vehicle floor may result in a substantial variation in the location of the seat attachment features on the riser. Such variation of attachment feature location resulting from stack-up of tolerances of the various components may cause significant problems in assembling the seat onto the risers.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a collapsible riser assembly for each seat in which the problem associated with stack-up tolerances for seat attachment features is alleviated, and in which weight is reduced from the removable seat.